Career Spotlight: Before you send that E-mail . . .
Employees should think twice before hitting the send button on their next E-mail: The head honchos may be watching. Monitoring employee E-mail has become common practice in the workplace over the past few years, quickly becoming standard practice. Almost half of all employers now store and review E-mails, up from 27 percent just six years ago, according to the American Management Association.
Tightened corporate scrutiny by regulators and shareholders is fueling the trend. Under the microscope themselves, companies are paying closer attention to information coming in and out the door. In a survey this year by Proofpoint, a messaging security firm, 72.3 percent of companies reported installing systems to monitor E-mail because of financial disclosure compliance issues, a jump from 65 percent of employers last year.
Compliance with rules like HIPAA (which governs the use and release of medical information) prompted Rochester, N.Y.-based Sutherland Global Services to install E-mail security software this year. The outsourcing firm often handles sensitive information like credit cards and medical records; company heads wanted to ensure that this information remained private. Sutherland now has a system in place that checks outgoing E-mail for key phrases or words, putting a quarantine on any message that may contain private information.
"We can't globally say goodbye to E-mail," says Tony Placilla, director of information security at Sutherland. "We have to manage it."
But companies are not concerned only about financial or security transgressions. More and more companies are no longer turning a blind eye to unacceptable personal behavior by employees. E-mail security companies are reporting steady demand from customers eager to track their employees' online missteps, for myriad reasons.
"Employers have no qualms or reservations about snooping on employees' E-mail," says Mike Grundling of iLumin, which offers software to record and archive E-mail. Just five years ago, "we wouldn't have seen or heard the stories we are privy to now."
That means using technology to scan E-mails for everything from foul language or signs of sexual harassment to making sure that an employee is working and not playing fantasy baseball on the company's clock.
Caught red-handed, employees can find the results disastrous. Real-life tales of dismissals or firings abound: Wall Street stock analysts Jack Grubman and Henry Blodget are just two well-known names whose E-mails were used against them. Most recently, flirtatious communications between Boeing CEO Harry Stonecipher and a female employee resulted in Stonecipher's dismissal.
The bottom line for workers? Says Jeremy Gruber, legal director for the National Workrights Institute: "Employees should never write anything on their computer that they would not be comfortable sharing with their employers."
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